Category Archives: Personal

Coming back here, I suddenly remember why I stopped posting: the back end of this blog is inexplicably slow. Like minutes to load a page slow. So I don’t know how many more times I’m going to come over here and brave it. I do have a blog over at Reminted Jewelry: https://remintedjewelry.com/blog/ You can also follow Reminted Jewelry on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/reminted I really wish Word Press would just work. It works for the RJ site. I don’t

I know: I never call. I never write. Truth be told, I lost my inspiration for this blog. For more than a year, I was bursting with things I wanted to talk about. And then the ideas kind of dried up. I was also busy with other writing projects, including a novel which will absolutely never see the light of day. But I have a new project: Reminted Jewelry. The short version of how it came to be: Grandpa bought

A few months ago, I wrote how I was going for silent for a little while because I was writing a book. Specifically, I was editing my master’s thesis on Renaissance occult philosophy (not light reading) for publication, which will hopefully happen next spring. And then I went largely silent for two months. The good news is I got the manuscript done. The bad news is just a couple days after I posted that, I had a bicycling accident. It

This year, over 60,000 geeks of all flavors converged on Indianapolis, Indiana for the Gen Con gaming convention, held between July 30 And August 2. It offered over 15,000 different events, most of which were opportunities to play just about every game imaginable, including role-playing games, collectible and non-collectible card games, board games, historical and non-historical miniature games, party games and electronic games. There’s also seminars, panels, workshops, autograph opportunities, film screenings, a gigantic vendor hall and more. Perhaps the

Every year, the Greatest International Scavenger Hunt the Would Has Ever Seen (Gishwhes) invades the lives of thousands of people. For one week, they find time to accomplishing things touching, silly, bizarre, challenging and occasionally moderately embarrassing, with their registration fees going to the Random Acts charity. This gem is the brainchild of actor Misha Collins, who plays Castiel on Supernatural. He gets other celebrities involved too, generally willingly. William Shatner actually plays, for example, and various challenges involve players

History, Interrupted will likely go silent for the next few weeks while I work on edits for a manuscript accepted for publication. Ten years ago, I wrote Finding God in the World: Approaches of the Renaissance Occult Philosophers to the Nature and Value of Matter as my master’s thesis. It won awards. It baffled my thesis committee. I had an all around good time with it. Now, Avalonia Press is going to publish it, but I need to do some

Let’s take history back from the historians. This is the message of History for All by Hashtag History. Now, I’ve got nothing against popular culture history, so long as it bears some resemblance to actual history (which is why I can enjoy The Tudors but not Sleepy Hollow, for example). What I do have a problem with is this mentality that intellectual approaches to history are somehow a bad thing, and Hashtag History is certainly not the first to express

This semester is running me ragged, so frequently the last thing I want to do when relaxing is do even more writing than all already am. So, one of the ways I’m relaxing is getting back into artwork. The first image (above) came out of a friend’s Master’s thesis in art, where she created “portraits” of various role-playing characters using only an eye. I then took one of those eyes and turned into an entire face. So if you feel

In my young table-top roleplaying game years, the GenCon gaming convention was game, game, game, sleep, game, game, game, sleep? game, game, nap at table, game, sleep, game. Today there’s a little more sleep and a little less gaming, but there’s also friends. Every year since I started seriously LARPing, I’ve made a new set of friends at GenCon, and somewhere in that game/sleep cycle, we set aside time for food and beer. (Game, game, beer, sleep, game, game, beer,

On Saturday, I will by cycling 62 miles (100 km, which we call a metric century) in the Trek 100 and am looking for pledges. All money goes toward research into fighting childhood cancers. Currently, I’m $14 short of my goal of $124, which is $2 for each mile biked. For me this is personal in two ways. First, I have a cousin who survived pediatric ovarian cancer, which is almost unheard of. I also lost a friend in high